Cindy Gallop - Make Love Not Porn: Technology’s Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior

Make Love Not Porn

Technologys Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior

By Cindy Gallop

I date younger men.

It started quite by accident. In 2002, I was running an advertising agency, and we were asked to pitch for an online dating brand. No one on my team had experience in online dating, so in order to get a better understanding of the client, we all signed up on their site, as well as across a good selection of the competition. The rest of my team were all married, living with partners or dating, and so they created fake personas online in order to conduct this research. I was the only one who was single. Since I needed to do this for my job anyway, I thought, why not do it for real and see what this whole online dating thing was all about?

When I registered my profile online, I was completely honest about everything, including my age. To my surprise, I received an avalanche of responses extremely good for the ego. But even more to my surprise, 75 percent of those responses were from younger men; the majority were much younger than me (I was 42 at the time Im 51 now). For them, I was a fantasy come true: an attractive older woman willing to have a no-strings-attached relationship. I was four years into having started up the U.S. office of a London-based ad agency, worked incredibly long hours and traveled a huge amount. All I wanted was to have some fun, which was distinctly missing from my life at the time. Clearly, there were a bunch of younger men out there going Whoopee! at the sight of my profile. I had not started with this particular dating strategy in mind, but I thought, well, what the hell, works for me!

So I proceeded to date younger men for a year and had an absolute whale of a time. Then, rather ironically, I met a man online who was only two years younger than I and with whom I fell madly in love. We were together in a committed relationship for two and half years, which I ended four years ago. In the aftermath of that upsetting breakup, I needed distraction, so I reverted to my previous strategy of dating younger men and have been happily doing so since.

The men I date tend to be in their twenties or early thirties. Obviously, when I date younger men, I have sex with younger men very enjoyably. I gradually began to notice, however, that having sex with younger men often involved a number of interesting dynamics (and, if you like, sexual memes) that felt increasingly recognizable. Those moves, those facial expressions, that particular modus operandi seemed familiar. And hadnt I heard those accompanying verbal expressions somewhere before? Eventually it struck me that what I was encountering, very directly and personally, were the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography in our culture.

Today, hardcore pornography (and by hardcore, were not talking the soft-focus nudity of Cinemax; I mean graphic and explicit sexual acts) is more freely and widely available via the Internet than ever before. That means kids are accessing it at earlier and earlier ages than ever before. According to research data published by TopTenReviews, the average age at which a child first views porn online is 11. In December 2009, Mashable posted the results of a survey by Web security firm Symantec Corp. that identified the fourth-most-popular search term by 7-year-olds and under as porn, ahead of Club Penguin and Webkinz. Furthermore, in June 2010, a survey published by Psychologies magazine in the U.K. found that one-third of the children surveyed had accessed online porn by the time they were 10. More than 80 percent of the children surveyed between the ages of 14 and 16 said they regularly accessed hardcore photographs and footage on their home computers, and two-thirds watched it on their mobile phones. At the same time, 70 percent of the children surveyed said they had never been physically intimate with anyone, meaning their first experience and understanding of sex was what they happened to see online. Today, there is an entire generation of boys and girls growing up believing that what you see in hardcore porn is the way that you have sex.

This is exacerbated by the fact that we live in a culture of double standards when it comes to sex. We all do it, yet we dont talk about it. Most parents are too embarrassed to teach their children about sex and talk to them about the issues surrounding it. Three-quarters of the children surveyed by Psychologies said their families never discussed online porn with them. Most countries around the world have not formalized and integrated sex education into the educational system and curriculum, and those schools and colleges that try to make up that educational gap run into issues of political correctness and are vilified for doing so. As a result, hardcore porn has become, by default, the sex education of today.

Thats not a good thing.

So when I realized the nature and the root cause of what I myself was encountering, I decided to do something about it.

I planned to create a website called MakeLoveNotPorn, where I would post the myths of hardcore porn and balance them out with the reality.

I told designer Rodger Ruzanka that I wanted MakeLoveNotPorn to live in the world of hardcore porn, without the slightest whiff of education or public service announcement. I made the site funny, as well, writing all the copy myself. I deliberately made it lighthearted, to defuse the awkwardness and embarrassment that can so easily ensue around any discussion of sex. It was important to me, too, that MakeLoveNotPorn was not in any way judgmental. Its not about This is good or This is bad, because sex is the area of human experience that embraces the widest possible range of tastes and proclivities.

The construct of MakeLoveNotPorn is Porn World vs. Real World this is what happens in the porn world, versus this is what happens in the real world we live in. There are 10 Porn World vs. Real World stories on the site, each directly inspired by my personal experience of what can happen when technology enables an unparalleled level of access to porn, which then informs and drives real-world human sexual behavior. Here are nine of them (the 10th is a summary, which Ive therefore left to the end of this book):

When filming porn, the actors are told to open up for the camera, in order to provide as much visibility for close-ups of the actual point of entry as possible. (Close embraces that dont show anything are deployed more in so-called soft-core porn.) I like to think of my body holistically as one big erogenous zone. I love the sweaty pleasure of skin-on-skin contact when were both wrapped around each other, getting as close as possible. While changing it up positionwise is fun, switching rapidly through a series of positions in which youre only joined by the genitals is not the most fulfilling way to go. Ive found myself having to do a certain amount of, Hey, come here, Mister literally pulling my partner into an embrace to get as fully tactile as Id like.

In porn, the male climax generally known colloquially as the pop shot always happens out in the open, in order to testify to its reality. And most often these days in hardcore porn, its de rigueur to deliver the load on the womans face.